PAST EXHIBTIONS - 2023

DIFFERENTIAL GROWTH 

Hilda Piazzolla (SE/DK) 

9 November – 16 December 2023

Ceramic artist and former lecturer at the Royal Danish Academy Martin Bodilsen Kaldahl opened the exhibition

The exhibition title, Differential Growth, refers to a biological phenomenon in nature, a particular way in which organic systems take shape: when one part of a cell grows at a different rate than the rest, the organism will develop in different directions, leading to the emergence of complex patterns, surfaces and structures. 

The pieces in the exhibition are the result of a digital algorithm programmed to make the object grow without touching or intersecting any part of itself as it takes form. Hilda Piazzolla designed the algorithm by modifying certain parameters and challenging the shapes through physical restrictions. The ceramic printer creates diverse shapes, which spark associations to coral, brain cortex or twisted tree trunks. 

Piazzolla is fascinated by the dialogue that arises when she influences or intervenes in the digital design process in a search for new expressions in the borderland between digital and tactile, controlled and uncontrolled. This is evident, for example, in her glaze studies, as she applies runny glazes by hand while the printer is operating or by manipulating the firing process to affect the way in which the glaze melts and creates drip-like forms. 

Hilda Piazzolla (b. 1988) takes an experimental approach to production methods and processes with a focus on the material expressions of clay. She is interested in the use of additive craft processes and has worked with 3D printed ceramics for the past ten years.  

Piazzolla earned an MA from the Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design and Conservation in 2017. She lives and works in Copenhagen. After graduation, she has exhibited ceramic art in design and exhibition venues in Prague, Reykjavik, Sweden, Shanghai and Milan and at NCECA in Richmond, Virginia. She has previously exhibited at Peach Corner, in the duo exhibition Loop Works (2021). 

Thanks to the Danish Arts Foundation for supporting the production of the exhibition. 

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ALCHEMISTS’ CONVENTION  

A ceramic meeting between past and present

5 October – 4 November 2023

Ane Fabricius Christiansen, Lisbeth Voigt Durand, Vinni Hedegaard Frederiksen, Karen Kitani Harsbo, Sophus Ejler Jepsen, Annelie Grimwade Olofsson, Lise Seier Petersen, Bente Skjøttgaard, Anne Tophøj.

Visual artist and art historian Jan Bäcklund introduced the exhibition

ALCHEMISTS’ CONVENTION is a research-based project and group exhibition drawing inspiration from sculptor Niels Hansen Jacobsen’s (1861–1941) ceramics at Vejen Art Museum.

The project has been in the making for a couple of years and included three workshops at Vejen Art Museum. In an in-depth study of Niels Hansen Jacobsen’s working process, the participating artists found inspiration and incorporated new or rediscovered materials and methods into their own works.  

The result of this explorative approach is presented in a large group exhibition that opened on 10 September at Vejen Art Museum, while Peach Corner hosts the launch of the book about the project and a satellite exhibition focusing on a single significant piece by each of the participating artists. 

The exhibition title, ALCHEMISTS’ CONVENTION, refers to ceramic makers’ and artists’ in-depth experiments with chemistry and metals. In one of the workshops, we had the pleasure of hearing Jan Bäcklund explain how ceramic relates to alchemy. 

Many thanks to Vejen Art Museum, Museum Director Teresa Nielsen and other project partners and to the initiators of ALCHEMISTS’ CONVENTION, Ane Fabricius Christiansen and Vinni Hedegaard Frederiksen.  

The project has received support from the Danish Arts Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation, the A.P. Moller Foundation and Beckett-Fonden.

About the artists:

Ane Fabricius Christiansen (b. 1978) walked in Niels Hansen Jacobsen’s footsteps, experimenting with locally sourced materials, including clay from Skibelund and metal from the iron foundry Uldalls Jernstøberi in Vejen. Ane Fabricius’s works contain an entire universe of nuanced colours and textures, from shiny glazes to coarse, bubbly masses. What might, at first glance, look like a sloppy approach to materials is in fact carefully planned – a playful engagement with gravity and melting points and an attempt at balancing controlled and uncontrolled processes in a single abstract form. 

Lisbeth Voigt Durand (b. 1946) used chemical calculations based on Seger formulas and analyses of Niels Hansen Jacobsen’s glazes to produce a large number of new glaze samples. The process involved XRF analyses carried out by Arne Jouttijärvi, Heimdal archaeometry, Hansen Jacobsen’s notes in old ledgers and address books and glaze recipes from the workshop of Jean Carriès, who was Hansen Jacobsen’s neighbour in Paris. At Peach Corner, Lisbeth V. Durand presents a small series of wheel-thrown cylinders. Her goal was to maintain focus on glazes, and small nuances and textural variations are easier to appreciate on simple, similar forms. 

Vinni Hedegaard Frederiksen (b. 1975) created casts of her own fists. The reproduced hands are smooth, in contrast to the raw clay, which Vinni dug up in Skibelund and Vejen. They are also symbolically powerful. An excavation of Hansen Jacobsen’s kitchen midden revealed a collapsed ceramic piece that had melted and fused with the kiln posts and shelf. To Vinni Frederiksen, this ‘accident’ has a powerful and sculptural expression; it also shows that at times, Hansen Jacobsen struggled with clay, glazes and firing.  

Karen Kitani Harsbo (b. 1963) looked to the portrait bust, a genre that Hansen Jacobsen also worked in. The sculptures shown at Peach Corner refer to the Roman figure Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions, who looks towards both past and future. Here, Janus is manifested as a ceramic sculpture, a medium with a long cultural past but produced using the futuristic technology of 3D printing. The material is porcelain, and some of the glazes are the results of experiments in workshops at the Alchemists’ Convention.

Sophus Ejler Jepsen (b. 1971) presents ceramic artefacts from three so-called shadow stories: ‘Frankensteins Kop&Bryst’ (Frankenstein’s Cup&Chest), ‘Fiskeren og hans Sjæl i en Flaske’ (‘The Fisherman and His Soul in a Bottle’) and two dishes from ‘Peter Schlemihls Te-selskab’ (Peter Schlemihl’s Tea Party). The sculpture Skyggen (The Shadow) is Niels Hansen Jacobsen’s principal piece, and in recent years, as the museum’s art facilitator, sculptor Sophus Ejler Jepsen has retold and reinterpreted existing ‘shadow stories’ in words, music, painting and ceramic. 

Annelie Grimwade Olofsson (b. 1991) worked with the Gothic expression in Hansen Jacobsen’s sculptural practice. His Trolden (Troll) provided a mythological perspective. Elements of the troll’s body parts can be seen in Annelie’s morphological plant creatures: the gripping claw, the spine and her finger marks in the clay. Annelie Grimwade also used colour oxides in her glazes based on XRF analyses of Hansen Jacobsen’s glazes.

Lise Seier Petersen (b. 1952) has worked with melting clay for a number of years, particularly with studies of earthenware clay’s melting point and sintering interval (the range from the temperature at which the clay begins to deform to the temperature at which it is liquid). In the resulting liquid forms, Lise Seier draws parallels to the drapery in Niels Hansen Jacobsen’s sculptures. The object shown at Peach Corner is a wheel-thrown cone in blue and red clay with an interior pipeclay coating. The object’s appearance after firing is determined by the interaction between the hand-crafting process and the laws of physics. 

Bente Skjøttgaard (b. 1961) focused on the metal mountings that Niels Hansen Jacobsen created during his time in Paris (ca. 1892–1900). At one of the workshops in Vejen, experiments were carried out with casts made of a zinc-tin alloy using cire perdue technique under the guidance of goldsmith Boy Johansen from Aarhus. Some of the plaster moulds cracked, and the metal leaked into the sand. This resulted in beautiful sand-cast shapes, which Bente Skjøttgaard used in her work. At Peach Corner, she presents a piece from her series Stamtræer (Family Trees) that includes both sand-cast tin and a bone-ash foam glaze from another experiment based on the XRF analyses.

Anne Tophøj (b. 1960) drew inspiration from Niels Hansen Jacobsen’s loose, random form and glaze expressions. Aiming to seize and build on chance occurrences, as he also appears to have done, she engaged in a dynamic flow, where things happened and developed as the process unfolded. Anne Tophøj uses a jollying technique that involves a high degree of chance and variation in form. The result is wild shapes with a dynamic, flowing or sliding character.  

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Nectar

Jasmin Franko (DK)

17 August – 23 September 2023

Exhibition opening by Madeleine Kate McGowan

In ancient Indo-European languages and mythologies, nectar is described as the drink of the gods and their source of immortality. With its sweet, golden, liquid form, nectar attracts innumerable species and beings. It gathers around it an ecosystem of pollinating organisms that migrate to the source for rest and recuperation. To the naked eye, the insects look almost like tiny gods with a sweet craving. This mutualism between beings and source is an interplay that is sweeter even than the nectar itself. 

Nectar  is Franko’s first solo exhibition at Peach Corner. The display is based on a scenario balancing between the figurative and the abstract; this scenario may be understood as an allegorical story about migration and living beings’ capacity for survival and desire for a symbiosis with nature.

In recent years, memory has been a key theme in Franko’s work. She is interested in the way we store memories and preserve recollections and how we collectively remember and forget our common history. 

Jasmin Franko (b. 1992) examines animism and folkloristic metaphors in the context of a global high-tech age. Franko’s family is Hungarian/German and Iraqi/Sudanese, and concepts such as roots, interculturality and migration are important sources of inspiration in her practice. In Franko’s art, clay is a poetic effect, a catalyst and a collective memory.

Franko trained at the Royal Danish Academy, Design on the island of Bornholm (2021). She lives and works in Copenhagen. She has exhibited widely, including at the gallery Andersen’s Contemporary in Copenhagen, CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark, CHART Art Fair and Felix Art Fair.

Thanks to the Danish Arts Foundation for supporting the production of the exhibition.

Also, special thanks to Adam Varab.

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THE RESERVOIR

Petra Dalström (SE)

25 May – 1 July 2023

Exhibition introduction by Malou Solfjeld, art historian and curator.

A reservoir is a place where a liquid substance is stored until it transitions to a different state. A reservoir is controlled suspense, a dammed-up body of water, yearning for release.

In this exhibition, the viewer encounters a series of installations that either are or have been part of a circuit. Over the course of the exhibition period, the water in a container evaporates, and a mountain of kaolin gradually emerges. A tall, thin candle burns down, while a copper instrument measures an uncertain unit of time. Water drops are collected until they suddenly cause a small seesaw to activate the sound of a bell. 

The Reservoir is an exhibition that focuses on the container as a potential source of movement and examines materials in transformation. The exhibits are all results of experiments, many of them striking a delicate balance between control and collapse.

Petra Dalström (b. 1987) explores how materials are affected by basic phenomena, such as gravity and time. Her works revolve around observations of the sensuous and physical qualities of materials. She often incorporates low-tech methods, such as thermodynamics, capillary forces or surface tension, to generate movement or development in her works of art.

Dalström trained as a ceramic designer at the Royal Danish Academy – Design, Bornholm, and mainly works in Denmark and Norway. She has presented at a number of exhibitions, including Mindcraft18 (IT), Crafted Matter (KR), Tag Team Studio (NO), Norwegian Sculptors Society (NO) and Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling (The Artists’s Autumn Exhibition) (DK). The exhibition at Peach Corner is Dalström’s first established solo exhibition in Denmark.

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There is constantly something happening

Caroline Slotte (FI) and Gitte Jungersen (DK)

13 April – 20 May 2023

Opening adress by Pernille Stockmarr, curator at Designmuseum Danmark.

Ceramics can be transformed in a split second if they are accidentally dropped and shatter. Or they can be slowly worn down – touched by hands, scratched by cutlery, their surface eroded by wind and weather. From the moment of creation, any object is also an incipient ruin, since, just as there is a ‘before’, there will also be an ‘after’. Over time, the objects are going to break up completely and enter into new physical manifestations. 

Caroline Slotte’s works begin with antique porcelain plates. She sandblasts, grinds and cuts her way into the material, bringing new poetic images out of the familiar utilitarian objects. In her series Tracing, a miniature sandstorm has swept the original pieces, removing layer after layer of material. A landscape painted in cobalt blue, a sky, a cloud, a tiny person – the image is slowly eroded away, turning into white dust on the workshop floor. The flat blue painted scene gradually transforms into something akin to an imprint or an X-ray image, as if a memory of the image had sunk into the surface and is now slowly emerging as a three-dimensional recollection. In Under Blue Skies, all that remains is a few blue clouds. The clouds, which were originally added as background on the outer edge of the central image, move to the foreground, now accompanied by an outline of the elements that have been eroded away: a church, a tree, a floral border. The vanished areas can be glimpsed as negative forms in the white porcelain body.  

In Gitte Jungersen’s large glaze objects, creation and destruction seem like two extremes that are closely connected. Piece #2 and Piece #3 consist of different glazes poured out in thick layers. Usually, even on a large sculpture, the glaze is only present as a thin layer, but here, the glazes take on a format that mirrors the human body. Like a blown-up detail or something seen through a microscope. All the glazes are coloured with cobalt oxide, which in the chemical make-up of the different glazes unfolds in varying colour shades and textures, from a greyish blue lava-like mass to a deep blue high-gloss shine. Glaze comes into being when different raw minerals coalesce and transform, becoming something new as a result of the firing’s dramatic, destructive and disintegrating forces. The transformation which occurs during the firing is retained as a frozen moment of a dynamic dimension that is felt and attracts like a quivering undertone in the finished work.

Caroline Slotte (b. 1975 in Helsinki, Finland) trained at Design School Kolding (1995–98) and the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD) at the University of Bergen (2001–03). Slotte also holds a PhD in artistic research from KMD, Universitety of Bergen (2007–11). From 2017 to 2022, Slotte was a professor of ceramic art at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Selected exhibitions: Ceramics Facing the New, Espoo Museum of Modern Art, 2021; Broken Nature, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2020–21; Riska & Slotte, Gallery Format, Oslo, 2018; Revive, Remix, Respond, The Frick Pittsburgh, 2018, Visioning Future: Cheongju Craft Biennale, 2017; PAGES, Konsthantverkarna, Stockholm, 2016; My Blue China!, Bernardaud Foundation, Limoges, 2015; Zwinger und Ich, Bomuldsfabrikken Kunsthall, Arendal, 2015; Solo, Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo, 2014; Tenderness, Galleri F15, Moss, 2013; New Blue-and-White, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2013; Making Knowledge, Gustavsbergs Konsthall, Stockholm, 2012; Thing Tang Trash, KODE, Bergen, 2011; Object Factory, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, 2009. Selected representation: Museum of Modern Art, New York (US), Museum of Arts and Design, New York (US), Victoria and Albert Museum, London (UK), Musée Ariana, Geneva (CH), National Museum of Scotland (UK), Nasjonalmuseum, Oslo (NO), KODE Art Museums, Bergen (NO), Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (SE), Röhsska Museum, Gothenburg (SE), Design Museum, Helsinki (FI)

Gitte Jungersen (b. 1967) graduated from the Danish Design School (now the Royal Danish Academy) in 1993. Selected exhibitions: RUIN, solo exhibition at Officinet, Copenhagen, 2022; Bend, Bubble and Shine, Hostler Burrows NY and Los Angeles, 2021; Ceramic Works, A. Petersen, Copenhagen 2019; Crafted Matter, Cheongju Crafts Biennale, Korea, 2019; Ceramic Momentum, CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark, Middelfart, 2019; People Who Pot, MDR Gallery, London, 2019 Mindcraft 18, San Simpliciano, Milan, 2018; Tilstedet, solo exhibition in Bagsværd Church, 2017; Ultimate Impact, the Round Tower, Copenhagen, 2017; Glaze – Chemistry, Mass and Myth, Sophienholm, Lyngby, 2017; Fireworks, Gustavsbergs Konsthall, Stockholm, 2016; Zwinger und Ich, Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthal, Arendal, 2015; Setting the Stage, Copenhagen Ceramics, 2012; Thing Tang Trash, KODE Art Museums, Bergen, 2011.  Representation: Musee Ariana, Geneva (CH), Nordenfjeldske (NO), Public Art Agency Sweden, Stockholm (S), Nationalmuseet, Stockholm (S), KODE Art Museums Bergen (NO), Danish Arts Foundation (DK), McManus Galleries, Scotland (UK), CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark (DK), Designmuseum Danmark (DK), New Carlsberg Foundation. Awards and grants: Danmarks Nationalbank’s Anniversary Foundation’s appreciation grant 2020, Ole Haslunds Hæderslegat 2008, Danish Arts Foundation’s three-years working grant 2000.

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Out of Pocket 

Kristine Tillge Lund (DK)

23 February – 1 April 2023

Curated in collaboration with visual artist Owen Armour.

Introduction by Anne Kølbæk Iversen, reseacher and writer 

Imagine the sound of a car door slamming. And then another. A whole series of car doors slamming, endlessly. Hollow, sharp, muted, loud. An engineered sound. And then: silence. Even the silence inside the car is part of its design, marking a short break from the outside world, a private sphere in the midst of the busy world, city, traffic, that the car ads are trying to sell us. The car is a product and a status object that we consume in order to reconstruct ourselves within a certain lifestyle, not just to meet a set of fairly stable needs. It is simultaneously a functional and an aesthetic object – developed to be driven, seen, touched. The car is an extension of our body, an armour that gives us superhuman strength, makes us strong, heavy, untouchable. Is there an inherent dilemma in having access to the acceleration that the car represents, which is so far beyond our own human speed, becoming speed?

With the exhibition Out of Pocket, Kristine Tillge Lund presents captivating and abstract ceramic objects that examine the car as a design object and a fetish. With analytical curiosity, the car has been disassembled, chopped up and divided into separate components. Four doors, cast into the shape of car doors from different 1990s cars, a shelf unit and two containers are presented as disconnected, isolated objects in the room. The car is a thoroughly designed object, but its design is intended to be inconspicuous. It is only when it is removed from its customary context that the design itself stands out – not least the design elements seen in relation to the body and as an extension of it. Through the car’s design, we can discern the proportions of the imagined driver and the social perceptions associated with the interior space of the car. Inside the car, the body is placed into a fixed position that has been determined by others. There are no other spaces where that particular design is used or makes sense.

The car is also a mode, a place and a state. An object we might desire as well as a means to achieve something we desire. Cars have an erotic quality stemming from their shapes and our own fantasies of power and speed, status and freedom. Think of Lolita’s road trip with Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s novel: it represents their feeling of freedom but also the forbidden, perverse obsession that does not allow them to stand still and which becomes a prison to them both.

But where is the car in this exhibition? The abstract and isolated shapes distributed throughout the room are disconnected, only held together by an idea. All the objects come from car interiors and are within reach from the driver’s seat. At some point, these fragments have been picked up and stamped out of the flow of time in order to become part of this collection. The displays give rise to unusual associations. The door shells have been left to dry in an oversize dish rack, and the walls have been equipped with pockets. What are the implications of the notion of washing a car in a kitchen sink? The endless fantasies about women and cars – the car as a woman, women posing on top of cars – have been turned inside out and reassembled. The new fantasy is an anachronism, or it exists outside time: here, the colour of a 1970s sportscar is combined with car doors from the 1990s and ashtrays for a smoking driver; it is liberated from the shape of the car. From this display, you can select individual components, put on the Transformer’s armour, walk into the desert and roll down the window as you observe the sky and the passing cars.

Anne Kølbæk Iversen


Kristine Tillge Lund (b. 1973, Frederiksberg). Lives in Copenhagen and is a member of a workshop collective in Frederiksberg. Tillge Lund graduated from the Royal Danish Academy – Design, Bornholm, in 2001. After some years as a practising ceramic artist, she earned an MA from the Royal College of Art in London in 2008. She has worked as an independent ceramic artist ever since. Tillge Lund has taken part in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Denmark and abroad, including at Gustavsbergs Konsthall in Sweden, Mindcraft in Milan and Bagsværd Church, Copenhagen Ceramics and Toves Galleri in Copenhagen. She has been awarded grants from Danmarks Nationalbank’s Anniversary Foundation of 1968 and the Danish Arts Foundation and has received awards from, among others, Annie og Otto Johs. Detlefs fond, Ole Haslunds Kunstnerfond and Anne Marie Telmànyi født Carl-Nielsens fond til støtte for kvindelige billedkunstnere. Tillge Lund has been the initiator of several major exhibitions and was a co-founder of the exhibition venue Stereo Exchange together with visual artist Owen Armour.

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Spatial Collage

Karen Bennicke (DK)

12 January – 18 February 2023

Director of Designmuseum Danmark, Adjunct Professor Anne-Louise Sommer gave the opening address

Architecture is Karen Bennicke’s primary source of inspiration. This perspective lends her works a strong spatial character, with light and shadow as key actors in a sort of intuitive mathematical construction of thematically connected serial sculptures. She operates in a field in between something distinct and recognizable and something vaguely defined that emerges in a space with harmonious as well as chaotic aspects. With this, she attempts to suspend the distinction between the logical and tangible universe of form that we are familiar with from our daily lives and a realm that is illogical, unfamiliar and absurd.

The largest object in the exhibition, the monumental Geometrical Composition from 2019, emerged as a paraphrase of a plan by the French-Japanese architect Bernard Tschumi. Bennicke blew up a selected detail from this plan and inflated it to create a three-dimensional form. Big, heavy and brutalist, its clear layering brings a strong dynamic quality to the expression. 

Over the past couple of years, Bennicke has based her work on a building by the French architect and sculptor Georges Adilon, a special-needs school built in 1976 in La Verpillière, France. The interesting aspect of this work of architecture is the interaction between four staggered bombastic elements that form the central core and express both gravity and interference. This core is under attack from a delicate, almost insect-like asymmetrical system of stairs, an interpretation Bennicke has transferred to her own visual expression. The series, which Bennicke has titled Spatial Collage, so far includes thirteen sculptures. The exhibition at Peach Corner presents the five most recent additions, a collection of tangible spatial forms that provide access to utopian mental spaces and visions. 

Karen Bennicke (b. 1943, Denmark). Lives and works in Bregentved near the Danish town of Haslev. Trained as a potter in 1958–1961. She has had her own studio since 1961. In 1972 she established a shared studio with writer and ceramic artist Peder Rasmussen in Copenhagen, since 1974 in the town of Bregentved. Bennicke has held numerous exhibitions both in Denmark and abroad and is represented in a several museums, including Designmuseum Danmark, Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Museé des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. She has received many grants and awards including the life-long honorary grant from the Danish Arts Foundation in 2016 and the Thorvald Bindesbøll Medal in 2017. 

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